Yet still more discussions...

Yet still more discussions...
(reposted with the author's permission. originally posted here)

The Philippine Daily Inquirer last Thursday came out with a front page story that detailed the life of a poor woman and her husband struggling to raise their eight children in poverty. I'm not linking the article here because I believe it's one of the worst the Inquirer has ever done, and it puts their motto, "balance news..." in jeopardy. I didn't take up journalism but I recognize a title seeping in bias when I read one. And on the front page with a miserable photo, too.

The reason I brought this up is that it was the core of a discussion my mother and I had that day; she thinking that in cases such as those, the RH bill should be beneficial, and I--very inarticulately--insisting that that woman does not need a freebie ligation but help in the form of better livelihood and education. I learned one thing from Mama that day, too; I learned that for some people, the RH measure is acceptable because it is hard to believe that the poor will ever change.

One of the things we can easily forget is that a person is a person no matter how much he makes, where he lives, how many limbs he's got, or in what stage of life he is. He has a heart, he has a mind, and if you're Christian, you know he is a child of God, therefore that he possesses the same dignity as any of the "better" folks out there.

No one, not even a poor person struggling to raise eight children, deserves to be neutered/spayed, because that is only done to cats and dogs. You do that to cats and dogs because if you don't they just multiply and get galis and spread diseases. People are not like that. People are better than that. We people can be taught, and we have a will, and besides, all of us at some point in our genealogy, were once dirt poor, too.

RH is not a solution to help people in poverty. It is a license to solve poverty by eliminating the poor. Not convinced?

FVR: “I think the philosophy of RH bill is that we must learn to produce quality people in this world instead of producing people who only end up as, say, beggars on the streets, scavengers, or sellers of cheap or prohibited items. This, I think, is the real valid argument in favor of the RH bill.” (May 18, 2011, PDI)

Makes you wonder what "quality people" are.

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BTW, my mom is neither for nor against the bill. And I love her! She is made of win.